“He's Moving Like a Tremendous Machine!”

My mother and my friend Jim both love horses and horse-racing movies, so they're both happy it's Derby day, and they're both looking forward to Disney's “Secretariat,” about one of the greatest horses who ever raced.

This morning, Derby morning, I watched the “Secretariat” trailer for the first time. The movie stars Diane Lane as the horse's owner, John Malkovich as the horse's trainer, and Margo Martindale (who played the American abroad narrating her Paris adventures in horribly accented French, in Alexander Payne's sweet, melancholy vignette in “Paris, je t'aime”) as the horse's namer. Good cast. But it looks awful. How do you make drama out of a horse winning the Triple Crown by 31 lengths? (“He's moving like a tremendous machine! Secretariat by 12! Secretariat by 14 lengths at the turn!...”) You make it all about the horse's owner.

Hopefully they'll still give us Chic Anderson's great call. October release.

COMMENTS

The worst part about this movie is going to be the fact that the horse (or horses)look nothing like Secretariat. As a huge fan of Big Red, I've been so looking forward to seeing the movie, but after I've seen the trailer I have lost interest. Secretariat was a knockout. The horse in the film are so plain-Jane that for anyone who knows what the real Sec looked like, it will be annoying and distracting.